Random ramblings

Day: January 16, 2012

I had planned to make this yesterday, to go with our roast dinner but I had some problems with the ingredients, so I had to postpone making it until today. The recipe is from Jamie’s Great Britain (which is really good for baking), you can see the episode the recipe is from here but I think you’ll need to buy the book if you want the exact recipe.

Anyway, I’m normally a stir it altogether at once and bung it in the oven girl, so making this was quite different for me and it took ages, with lots of different steps. I was really pleased with how the pastry went (Jamie can do no wrong with pastry recipes if I remember correctly) and the cranberry jam filling was delicious (soooo sour, like a really good sour sweet) but I wasn’t too sure about the frangipane, I don’t think it went wrong (other than me overcooking it a little, darn you oven – my oven, although a fan oven, always under cooks cakes, so I tend to always leave it at normal oven temperature instead of fan oven temperature when baking and I did the same with this recipe, I guess I shouldn’t have, still I managed to get it just before it burnt, it was just very brown), I just didn’t like the frangipane very much. I think there was too much of it (and I didn’t use all of it either) and there could have been more of the cranberry jam instead, although that may have been too sour for some people’s tastes (me and Mr. Lacer are at polar opposites with this recipe, he really likes the frangipane but thought the jam a bit too rich, whereas I loved the jam and thought the frangipane, which is made with walnuts in this case was too nutty for me).

Anyway, I try and think of baking like this as a learning curve, this sort of baking, as opposed to bung it all together in a bowl and stir baking, to me is more of a hobby thing, whereas bung in a bowl making is more of a day to day cooking thing. I always do like, with hobbies, to feel like I’m learning something and pushing myself. Me and Mr. Lacer have been watching the Sport Relief Celebrity Bake Off and I’d forgotten how much I love (the normal version of) the show, you would never ever catch me on Master Chef, oh god, the stress and the fancy food, no way (plus those presenters really annoy me) and you’re probably never going to catch me on Bake Off either but if someone held me at gun point and made me choose it would definitely be The Great British Bake Off, worrying about soggy bottoms seems far less taxing and Mary Berry’s sweet. So now whenever I do a complicated piece of baking, I always imagine Paul and Mary judging me, I think they’d have had a moan about my oven temperature / timings and also my pastry case shrunk a little too much when I was blind baking, but other than that it was ok.

(This is also a recipe I would never have been able to make before I bought my Kenwood Triblade last month, you certainly couldn’t make this recipe without a food processor and although the Triblade isn’t quite a full sized food processor, it’s just about big enough, whereas the little blender things that come with other handheld blenders I’ve owned, would never have been big enough).